Qubed Peas 1.0 JavaScript development environment
Focus
Web, Desktop, Shell
Responsibilities
Concept, Design, Coding
Timeline
Early 2013
Thoughts
Qubed Peas is a development environment for JavaScript apps that creates components out of everything you write. It manages all of the files and building and linking and allows for 1-click builds and 1-line installations of any software, no matter how complex.
Design
As a development environment the design of the tools was quite important. If it came down to it I was going to have to err on the side of speed instead of beauty. It was important that all major tools has both a RESTful interface and a CLI, or command line interface. This would offer the most flexibility for developers later who might have some great ideas.
The system was also always designed to be open source, so clarity of construction was important as I built out the many programs that make up the Qubed Pea system.
Technology
There was almost no choice here, NodeJS was going to be the backbone of this new system. It offered JavaScript as the development language while also being fast and cross-platform capable. All server-side actions are written in JavaScript with NodeJS. This also includes the entire web server that was written to support the environment and servlet engine that managed the workflow of the actions.
History
Frustrated with the recent dependency on frameworks in the JavaScript community I decided to spend the better part of a few years reconceptualizing how we develop JavaScript applications. Things had gotten too messy, too plug-in’ed, too complicated and simply everyone was selling the next best thing (if you only wrote everything this brand new way). It was time for a change.
The basic philosophy behind Qubed Peas is that developers are talented and don’t need a whole framework wrapped around their hands when they are coding. Getting things out of their way is what’s really needed. Qubed Peas is here to simply manage the way the project links together and builds. Everything else is the developer’s job.
Qubed Peas is a major re-think of how we manage our projects for the web and how to produce simple and true components.
There are some massive improvements in both workflow and code separation in Qubed Peas. It’s worth checking out the website for more information:
Visit qubedpeas.com
